Northern Crusades

The Northern Crusades or Baltic Crusades were military campaigns conducted by several Germanic Catholic kingdoms and military orders in an effort to Christianize all of the pagans—the Balts, the Finns, and the West Slavs—around the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic Sea. In some cases, such as with the Wendish Crusade, they were partly aimed at controlling the rich resources found in those lands.

The most notable of these campaigns were the Livonian and Prussian Crusades. Some of these wars were explicitly regarded as crusades during the Middle Ages. For example, the war against the Estonians and the "other pagans in those parts", authorized by Pope Alexander III's 1171 crusade bull, Non parum animus noster. However, others—such as the (possibly mythical) 12th-century First Swedish Crusade and several subsequent incursions, undertaken by Scandinavian Christians against the then-Pagan Finns—were dubbed "crusades" only in the 19th century, by romantic nationalist historians.